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Buy that lady a drink! Granted, she's kind of flighty, but, man, is she ever dynamite when it comes to moving markets. We're talking about Dame Rumor, who last week flashed her remarkable power to animate a dazzling array of drooping stocks, commodities, and currencies and send them leaping sharply higher both in the old world and the new.

Her handiwork was conspicuously present in Thursday's officially unconfirmed report by Reuters that when the G-20 (known among the cognoscente as the Gang of 20, whose sputtering ranks include finance ministers and central-bank governors from 19 leading economies and the European Union and the European Central Bank) hold their summit in Mexico, coincident with the end of the Greek election, they're prepared to furnish gobs of liquidity to financial markets if the results of the vote cause undue distress.

Here at home, Lady Rumor was busily spreading the word that the Federal Reserve, at this week's scheduled meeting of its Open Market Committee, was of a mind to announce another remedial easing action to take the sting out of the latest week's disappointing data on jobs, which unexpectedly emphasized that firing had gained the upper hand over hiring. Share prices, which had been dawdling, bolted sharply higher, across the board.

Up to that point, investors had been alternately discouraged and encouraged as stocks fell one day and promptly went up the next, as uncertainty, every investor's nemesis, proved the only certainty.

If, alas, you're blessed with an especially delicate sensibility and just can't stand the suspense of waiting for those cheery rumors to prove the real thing or not, we suggest you just try to relax and snuggle onto the nearest bar stool; you shouldn't have long to wait. Do remember, though, to ask Dame Rumor what she's drinking.

While we realize the Gang of 20's primary business at the Mexican summit is to nibble on tacos and sip margaritas, we feel they may spare a moment or two to unfurl a plan aimed at reassuring markets if the Greek vote threatens to cause some financial disturbance. Making promises is easy, they've discovered; keeping them, as it happens, isn't.

We might note, too, that the public outbreak of verbal hostilities between Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and Francois Hollande, France's new president, doesn't exactly inspire confidence in supposedly collaborative efforts to ameliorate a looming crisis. Whatever scheme the G-20 comes up with this time around seems more likely to set off intra-gang quibbles than to soothe troubled investors.

As we intimated last week, a better bet is that the Fed will take some step to buttress the economy and pep up the moribund job machine. And here the negative numbers on new claims for unemployment insurance may indeed nudge Bernanke & Co. to do something other than jaw-jaw at this week's gathering. There's some question, of course, whether Thursday's abrupt surge in the market and Friday's follow-through have discounted much of the effect any disclosure of fresh stimulus might have. A lot obviously depends on the form of any such easing.

We might point out, too, that in a way investors are indebted to Jamie Dimon, the suave chief of JPMorgan Chase, for his slick performance in the latest Washington follies staged by Congress. Jamie played the artful dodger, while the clowns (aka lawmakers), aspiring to the role of Tomás de Torquemada, the merciless leader of the infamous Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century, tossed puffball questions at him ostensibly designed to probe his bank's loss of a piddling few billion bucks fiddling with those toxic instruments known as derivatives.

With the spineless inquisitors groveling before him, it was child's play for Jamie to emerge not only unscathed and still adamantly opposed to more rigid constraints on banks, but also seemingly anointed by interlocutors for his sterling "leadership." He easily batted away the assortment of vacuous questions served up to him by those mostly adoring inquisitors. Effectively left unanswered was the critical question of whether the billions lost were the result of a huge hedge gone horribly wrong, or of pure and simple speculation.

WELCOME AS THE RALLY IS, we'd still rather err on the side of caution than get caught in the whiplash should, as rumor has it, the central bankers choose to try to pump some life in their economies and their efforts once again fall shy of expectations.

For that matter, it didn't take more than a day for oil to lose its newly acquired sheen as the hard fact of increasingly abundant supply countered the supposed benefits -- which incidentally were never evident to these rheumy eyes -- of OPEC maintaining the status quo of production (cheating on those supposed limits has long been viewed as one of the privileges of membership).

In like vein, Jamie Dimon's star turn before Congress may have warmed the hearts of fellow bankers and even restored some faith among investors in the sector, but it hardly ranks as an enduring positive. As Dave Rosenberg, Gluskin Sheff's man about markets and things economic, observes in his latest epistle, the banking recovery from the dark throes of the Great Recession is still hampered by the "continuing malaise in the residential-housing market."

Banks in the U. S., he goes on to explain, today have the same exposure to residential real estate -- about 40% of their total loan books -- as they did in 2006, when housing began its long descent from the biggest bubble in the industry's lively history. Although its fortunes have perked up a tad, housing, Dave reminds us, remains weak, something that its fans apparently have lost sight of in their eagerness to catch what's proving a highly elusive bottom. Housing prices remain a full 30% below pre-bust peaks.

Roughly 10% of housing-related loans, Dave reckons, are either delinquent (30 days or more in arrears) or in some stage of foreclosure proceedings. Besides nonperforming housing loans, he observes, banks hold a slew of what's called in the trade "real-estate owned," or REO, properties, which are part of the so-called shadow inventory. The REO, he elucidates, are properties with defaulted mortgages that have not been unloaded after foreclosure.

Currently estimated at 400,000 units, Dave observes, the volume of REO properties is pretty much what it was over the second half of 2011. If the housing market remains soft -- or, heaven forbid, weakens further -- obviously more and more currently delinquent mortgages would default. An unpleasant prospect, Dave notes, that would make it measurably tougher to sell defaulted properties at favorable prices. A double whammy of sorts.

In our book, other than for a session or two, neither a more aggressive twist or even QE3 is apt to enhance the appeal of run-of-the-vault bank stocks or shares of home builders. There are plenty of investment choices out there that, unless the market comes completely apart, are much less chancy and even might make you some dough.

ANY SENTIENT BEING WITH A PULSE can't escape knowing that this is an election year. Which means the pressure is on Bernanke to do something to goose the creaking economy besides look solemn and pass the baton to Congress -- itself a clinically inert body.

For a raft of disturbing data came pouring out of the pipe last week that said loud and clear the recovery wasn't shuffling doughtily along as it has been seemingly forever -- it's now threatening to stall completely.

This lamentable procession of downers was led by manufacturing. Industrial production was off 0.1% in May; a particular culprit in this category was auto output, which had been one of the stalwart supports of the shaky economy but did a U-turn last month. As Michelle Meyer of Bank of America Merrill Lynch points out, manufacturing is the most cyclical and quickest part of the economy to respond to weakening demand.

It also, she notes, is more dependant on exports and notably sensitive to trends in global growth, which, a little bird told us, isn't setting worlds on fire these days. And it isn't likely to with the euro zone falling into a deeper recession and emerging economies nothing to write home about.

Michelle sees the slowing in manufacturing as lending credence to her forecast that our economy is apt to inch ahead for the full year by a mere 1%.

The Fed's regional banks' latest reports, we're sorry to say, tend to confirm this bleak outlook The New York Fed's Empire State June survey of the region's general business conditions fell a wicked 15 points. The Philly Fed's index of the outlook for business in its region dived to minus-5.8, from the previous month's 8.5, and its first negative reading in eight months. Meanwhile, Chicago's PMI sank to 52.7, the lowest since September 2009, from April's 56.2.

What all these numbing numbers translate into is that the economy's fundamentals are in decline. Will somebody please tell Mr. Bernanke, who'd do well to cease and desist from uttering the phrase "moderate growth," which has been a centerpiece of his spiel about how the economy's doing and how it's likely to fare.